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Description
A highly critical account of the misguided attempts on the part of some members of the psychiatric profession of the 1950s and 60s to attribute mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder to cold, contradictory, or otherwise unwholesome parenting. The author incorporates the personal stories of parents who endured criticism for making their children sick, only to find themselves vindicated when the biological origins of these conditions were identified. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or. Read more
Publisher : Simon & Schuster; First Edition (October 7, 1998)
Language : English
Hardcover : 368 pages
ISBN-10 : 0684824973
ISBN-13 : 70
Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
Dimensions : 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #647,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #608 in Medical Psychoanalysis #2,715 in Medical General Psychology #16,515 in Psychology & Counseling
#608 in Medical Psychoanalysis:
#2,715 in Medical General Psychology:
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Top Amazon Reviews
As a researcher of the history of eugenics, I definitely wanted to investigate the "other side of the coin": the school of thought/philosophy/"science" that emphasized "nurture" over "nature." Unfortunately, the psychoanalysts, who actually had a few initial promising and insightful theories going for them, fell into the same faulty, didactic, pseudoscience argument as the eugenicists: all human behavior can be explained by one cause. In the case of the eugenicists, it was "nature"/genetics; in the case of the psychoanalysts, it was "nurture" as opposed to "nature" (and certainly "nurture" defined to include culture, class, history, economic deprivation, lack of education, lack of opportunities for improvement, etc. accounts for a great deal of human behavior and "abnormal" human behavior). But the psychoanalysts, for many reasons Mr. Dolnick investigates and explains (including the catastrophic downfall of eugenics but mostly due to the ideological dictatorship of Sigmund Freud) excluded everything from the concept of "nurture" to include only the "schizophrenogenic mother" (later on, the psychoanalysts very gallantly included the screwed-up dad and the entire family in their definition of "nurture/environment"). This "all human behavior has one cause" pseudoscience led the psychoanalysts down the dead-ends of attempting to cure (and claiming to cure) schizophrenia and autism, conditions that have a strong genetic component, as recent scientific investigation indicates. The results were illogical, non-evidenced based "parent bashing," causing undue suffering for the parents and the patients whom the psychoanalysts were claiming to cure. Some of these psychoanalysts, although misguided, actually had good intentions and displayed real empathy for, and near saintly tolerance toward, their very disturbed patients (Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Howard Searles, R.D. Laing). Others, like John Rosen and Bruno Bettelheim, were obviously far more invested in enshrining their own reputations and theories, to the point where they were quite willing to rationalize their own sadism and cover up their "treatment" which contradicted the very theories they touted.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2024 by Marie
This book exposes some misconceptions about the causes of mental illnesses that were widely held by the majority of mental health "experts" for almost fifty years. Every mental health professional should be required to read this book.
Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2012 by Don Kenney
The book was exactly as described and arrived promptly.
Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2015 by Amazon Customer
Excellent book.
Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2016 by Loomknitter
The madness in the title more properly should be assigned to the chair behind the couch. That is Dolnick's point: the shrinks themselves were mad. In their madness they blamed the parents for the illness of their children, particularly the mother. How did the schizophrenic get that way? He had a "schizophrenogenic" mother, typically a loveless woman who rejected the child while dominating it psychologically. How about autism? The victim of a "refrigerator mother" who withheld love from the child. The obsessive-compulsive disorder? Ditto, although here the patient was also singled out since the patient knew what he was doing, but just would not change. Dolnick does a great job of chronicling the delusive mind set of the shrinks who fought tooth and nail against any sort of biological explanation of mental illness even though the evidence was clear. They clung like barnacles to their delusions that these diseases were psychological because, should they admit that they were physical illnesses, caused by something physically wrong in the brain, their fraudulent "talk therapy" would be seen as it really was, useless, and their entire professional lives would be exposed as a waste. Dolnick begins with a studied demolition of Freud and psychoanalytic psychology. He exposes Freud's delusions about the causation of mental disease, about the nature of dreams, his obsessive belief in "symptoms as symbols," and especially his arrogant lack of scientific method. Dolnick shows how the "great" man bamboozled the psychiatric profession with his almost magical way with words, turning yes's into no's and vice versa as the situation required. The Freudian canon that sex was at the heart of every neurosis was so broad and varied that almost any convenient explanation could be found within. Soldiers suffering from shell shock would seem to be an exception, but no. Dolnick quotes Freud as arguing that "Mechanical agitation...[the hellish roar and rumble of trench warfare] must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation." (p. 37) Freud's ability to delude both himself and his colleagues is exemplified in the notorious case of Emma Eckstein who was operated on by Freud's friend, Wilhelm Fliess. She was suffering from "stomach ailments and menstrual pain" and "had problems walking." Fliess performed a nose operation but it did not go well. For one thing Fliess left some surgical gauze in Eckstein's nose. As she continued to hemorrhage Freud observed, "she became restless during the night because of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there; since I did not come during the night, she renewed the bleedings, as an unfailing means of rearousing my affection." (p. 47) The crux of Dolnick's book, though, is not about Freud but about his followers, especially the psychoanalytic psychiatrists from what he sees as the heyday of psychoanalysis, roughly the middle third of the twentieth century. He expresses the central delusion of the therapists in these words, "The ranting of the schizophrenic on the street corner, the retreat of an autistic child behind invisible walls, the endless hand-washing of an obsessive-compulsive were not simply acts, but messages. They were, the therapists fervently believed, desperate if inarticulate cries for help. And now, for the first time, those cries could be decoded." This self-serving delusion on the part of the shrinks is Dolnick's target and he hits it well, again and again. His technique is to describe in detail the latest Freudian disciple and his particular method of "treatment," how it is ballyhooed and how the psychiatrist himself is caught up in yet another wave of excitement and personal exultation. And then Dolnick gives the grim details, exposing the fake cures and nonexistent breakthroughs. Bruno Bettelheim in particular, who for decades covered up his lack of success in treating autism with attacks on parents ("All my life I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them." p. 216) is exposed as a violent and hypocritical man obsessed with protecting and maintaining his turf. In a particularly chilling chapter Dolnick recalls the progression of treatments from induced fever to electroshock to lobotomies. He describes the work of Dr Walter Freeman, who specialized in ice pick lobotomies in which an ice pick or similar tool is poked into the brain via the eye socket. Dolnick comments, "This was not merely driving without a map but barreling down the road with the windshield painted black." He quotes Freeman as asking a patient on the operating table, "What's going through your mind now?" The patient replied, "A knife." When the improvement of his lobotomized patients was short-lived, Freeman observed that "many patients had been too far gone to help. He had been wrong to call lobotomy a last resort; he realized now that it had to be used before it was too late." (p. 147) In a final chapter on "Placing the Blame," Dolnick compares "the therapists [who] had only the best intentions...[to] American communists in the forties and fifties who sincerely wanted a better world but refused to acknowledge Stalin's crimes..." (p. 278) He asserts that "beyond hubris" the fault lay in two factors, one, the sense that when psychoanalysis failed it was "somebody's fault" unlike the sense in conventional medicine that when it failed it might be nobody's fault; and two, "a lack of respect for science." He adds that the therapists were simply "ignorant and disdainful" of science. (p. 286) This "smugness and intellectual complacency" was "the besetting sin of psychoanalysis," according to Peter Medawar, who was astonished to find that psychoanalysts "seemed free of all such doubts" as most scientists in other disciplines normally encounter. (p. 287) I would add that psychoanalytic theory was like a new religion in the making. The analysts had experienced revealed truth and there was no confusing them with the facts. The sad result was "a tragedy" that "abounded in grief needlessly inflicted." (p. 278)
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Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2002 by Dennis Littrell
Dolnick's screed against Freud and psychoanalysis says nothing about Freud or psychoanalysis, but tells readers much about Dolnick, the writer. I would venture that Dolnick had a brilliant father and a talented mother and that Dolnick was extraordinarily envious of his father. Dolnick's attack against Freud and Freud's brilliant ideas and insights into humanity and civilization in this book are almost certainly his way of dealing with his own Oedipal complex and his feelings of inferiority to his father. I would also easily deduce from Dolnick's writings that he is attracted to extraordinarily powerful women as mother figures as his way of dealing with his sense of inferiority to his father that he has been unable to let go of. Dolnick's girlfriend or wife, no doubt, is either a woman who is more educated than he is, more talented and gifted than he is, or otherwise holds a more prominent position in society than he does or did. In such a relationship with a powerful mother figure, in Dolnick's mind, he psychologically "wins" his "mother's" love, as a compensation mechanism, "defeating" his father. So, while I learned quite a bit about Dolnick from his book, there is nothing in it that sheds any light on Freud or the history and development of psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, it's all too common for a work of ignorance like this one to get published and promoted.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2019 by Barbara Alexander